To Kill a Tsar (8 page)

‘The one on the right is Mikhailov – rather an old photograph, and on the left, the Jew, Goldenberg. The dvornik had no difficulty in identifying him. Mikhailov arrived and left with a young woman, petite, dark.’ Dobrshinsky paused, lifting his elbows to the desk, hands together as if in prayer, intense
concentration written on his face. ‘Her description seems to match one we have of a woman seen leaving the square after the attempt on His Majesty’s life.’

‘Do you want me to arrest Madame Volkonsky?’ Barclay asked.

‘Leave her – for now. Keep the house under surveillance. Have her followed. I don’t expect Mikhailov tells her anything, but he may risk using Number 86 for another gathering. She’s probably giving him money. I think it’s fair to assume Mikhailov and Goldenberg are still in the city. And now, if you please . . .’ Dobrshinsky nodded to the young agent perched anxiously at the edge of his chair.

‘Yes, Your Honour.’ Kletochnikov looked unsure quite what was expected of him.

‘Tell Major Barclay what the city police have told you.’

‘It’s Popov, Your Honour, the student revolutionary implicated in the death of the informer – Bronstein. He’s been seen among the men at the Baird Works.’

One of the foundry hands had tipped off the local police, Kletochnikov explained. Popov and the Muscovite labourers with whom he shared the room at the Neva were organising political meetings in the homes of sympathisers, distributing propaganda, agitating for a secret trade union, and the socialist gospel they preached was attracting new recruits, although the city police could not be sure how many.

‘So, as you see, another opportunity,’ said Dobrshinsky, impatiently pushing back his chair and rising to his feet. ‘Which is well and good because General Drenteln and the Justice Ministry are impatient for results. Soloviev was a nobody. It’s the men who gave him his gun and sent him out that we want.’

He turned to gaze out of the window on to the Fontanka, and for a moment the silence in the room was broken only by the noise of a carriage clattering along the embankment below and the heavy tick of the French clock on the mantelpiece.

‘Popov may be close to Mikhailov – Bronstein saw them together,’ Dobrshinsky said, turning to face them again. ‘Let’s find out where he lives then pick him up. He’s a nobody but he may take us one step closer to the six on the hotel list. ’

With a nod and casual wave of the hand, the collegiate councillor drew the meeting to a close. He slipped back behind his desk and was pulling a file across it when, almost as an afterthought and without lifting his head he said, ‘Oh, Vladimir Alexandrovich?’

‘Your Honour?’ Barclay was halfway to the door.

‘Would you like my clock?’

‘I don’t understand, Your Honour?’

‘What don’t you understand? Would you like my clock?’ he asked again with an enigmatic smile. ‘It is an excellent clock. It never seems to wind down or stop.’

‘Thank you, Your Honour, I have one of my own.’

I
t was with more than a little trepidation that Frederick Hadfield stepped from the droshky on to the pavement at the foot of St Boris and St Gleb. Pressing five kopeks into the cabby’s hand, he plucked his father’s battered medical bag from the seat and turned towards the shell of the new church rising from a forest of scaffolding on the bank of the Neva before him. Three towers in the Byzantine style were almost complete, but construction of the central dome had barely begun. The low wharf buildings and the school adjoining the site were painted in pink dust and probably had been for every one of the ten years since the foundation stone was cemented into place. The city’s wealthier inhabitants were not inclined to reach very deeply into their pockets to pay for a church they would never visit. The Peski district had an unsavoury reputation for crime and drunkenness, and gangs of youths roamed its badly lit, rubbish-strewn streets at night, unchecked by the police. Behind the peeling facades of its old rooming houses, the poor lived from hand to mouth in cramped and unsanitary conditions. A warren of dark corridors and flats, with many families forced to share a single noisy insalubrious room, privacy a thickness of tattered curtain. The district was home to a class of society the city government tried to pretend it owed no obligation to – shop assistants, factory workers and their families, apprentices, students, the jobless and destitute. The poorest of all lived in ramshackle wooden buildings – some no more than huts but others of two or three storeys – thrown up on unclaimed ground between the mansion blocks. Hadfield had never needed to visit
Peski although the Nikolaevsky Hospital was at the edge of the district and some of his patients were drawn from its streets. But a foolishly sentimental thought and an ambush at the opera placed him under an obligation to spend the day of rest in this most unappealing part of the city.
The Times
’s man, George Dobson, had inquired as to his mental health then accused him of being a dangerous radical.

‘How on earth did you get roped into it? When I write your obituary,’ he joked over lunch, ‘I will be sure to inform our readers that choosing to venture into Peski on a Sunday was not the selfless act they might think but a disgracefully vain one.’

They had dined well together and for too long at one of the city’s best restaurants and Hadfield was an hour later than promised at the church. He was to wait in front of the dusty scaffolding at the west end where he would be met and taken to the clinic. Swinging his medical bag a little to draw attention to his profession, he wandered to and fro in its shadow, scrutinising the faces of passers-by for a flicker of recognition. He was on the point of giving up when a boy of about ten, in a traditional belted shirt and with a shock of unkempt red hair, ran out of an alley at full pelt and across the square towards him.

‘Doctor?’ he asked breathlessly, his head bobbing in an awkward show of deference. ‘This way, please.’

‘You’ve been sent by Miss Kovalenko?’

‘To take you to the clinic,’ he said, wiping his nose with a dirty hand. ‘You’re late.’

It was all Hadfield could do to keep pace as the boy set off at a trot across the square. On into the dingy alley he had burst from with its galleried timber houses and shop fronts clinging to the mansion blocks like growths, damp and rutted underfoot, the air thick with the stench of rotting vegetable matter and effluent. On past a tavern, a drunk lying face down on the
cobbles, the beery carousing of many rising from the cellar below. Right then left then right again, twisting and turning, laundry dripping from the balconies above, an old man in rags hobbling along with his stick, street urchins with bare feet playing with a simple wooden top in the filth, and a young woman with greasy hair, her face empty of expression. After fifteen minutes’ hard walking the boy stopped at the door of a long two-storey building rather older in style than the rest of the street and, judging from what was left of the plaster, once a blue-grey colour. Chunks of render had fallen from the wall, exposing the naked pink brick behind, and there were rusty bars before the windows, opaque with grime and bird shit. The boy’s fist was raised to the door but it opened before he could knock to reveal a babushka with three small children. Beyond them, a gloomy hall with at least twenty people standing against the walls or sitting on low benches, their faces turned towards Hadfield and the light.

‘They’re waiting for you,’ the boy said, pushing roughly past the old lady. A young man rose from a bench and rapped on a door at the far end. A moment later, Anna Kovalenko was striding across the floor to meet him, the sharp purposeful click of her heels echoing through the hall. She was wearing a white pinafore over her skirt and blouse and her hair was pulled back in a severe bun. The deep frown he remembered so well from their first meeting at the political salon creased her brow and he felt ashamed he had lingered long over coffee and a cigar when sick people were waiting to see him.

‘Doctor Hadfield,’ she held out her little hand to greet him, ‘thank you for coming.’

‘I’m so sorry I’m late. I . . .’

But before he could make an excuse she dismissed it with a wave: ‘Can we begin?’

Evgenia Figner was waiting in the treatment room. She restricted her disapproval to a sharp look and small shake of
the head. The room was rectangular in shape, lit by two sash windows in the short wall opposite the door. A narrow white table stood in the centre with enamel bowls, scissors, strips of cotton cloth and medicine bottles on its scratched and pitted surface. A white bucket for medical waste had been placed on the rough boards beneath it. In one corner of the room a Russian stove, and along the wall a low table for patients’ clothes and belongings.

‘Is there anything else you need?’ The note of apology in Anna’s voice to explain there was nothing else.

‘No.’ He opened his medical bag and took out his coat: ‘All right, let’s begin.’

The first of the procession: the elderly and the very young, a pregnant woman with severe abdominal pain, a young bargeman with a knife wound to a forearm, a Tajik with infected gums. Burns, cuts, suppurating boils, and the sicknesses of poverty – rickets, malnutrition and a man with the telltale skin lesions of pellagra. Some patients he could refer to Anna and Evgenia for cleaning and bandaging, but most he was obliged to treat himself. At a little before five o’clock, he saw a boy of six with the acute onset of flaccid paralysis in his right arm. His face was pinched, the skin pulled tightly over his cheekbones, and he looked at Hadfield with careless eyes.

‘Where’s this boy’s mother?’

‘In the waiting room with her other children,’ Anna replied.

‘I think he has poliomyelitis. Ask everyone to leave the treatment room and bring her in. And I should look at her other children.’

It was Anna who spoke to the boy’s mother using the simple language of the village. The woman was dressed in a grubby purple and white striped dress, her full dark face framed by a red scarf, buxom, no more than twenty-five years of age, new to the city. Her boy was very sick, Anna explained, stroking the woman’s face tenderly with the back of her hand. He should
be kept from other children, even his little sisters, clinging to their mother, their faces buried in the folds of her dress.

‘Do you have something to make him better?’ the woman asked, turning to Hadfield. ‘You’re a doctor, aren’t you?’ Her lips and chin were twitching with barely suppressed emotion.

‘Do you have a room where the boy can sleep on his own?’ Hadfield asked.

She shook her head and looked away, but not before Hadfield could see she was biting her lip in an effort to hold back the tears. Anna touched his elbow and took a confidential step closer: ‘There are several families in one room. She shares a corner with her sister and her sister’s children.’

‘And the father?’

‘She hasn’t seen him for months.’

What could he do? The contagion would have to run its course. It might leave the boy a cripple for life or carry him away, but with nursing and good food there was a chance too of a full recovery. Lifting his medical bag on to the stool beside him, he took out a slip of paper and a pen and wrote a short note.

‘Take the boy to the Nikolaevsky Hospital tonight. Will she find it?’ he asked Anna.

‘I will send someone with her.’

Turning to the boy’s mother again: ‘Ask for one of my assistants, Anton Pavel, and give him this,’ and he handed her the note. ‘He will take care of your son. Be sure to ask for Anton.’

They worked on into the gloom of evening, the smoky light from the oil sconces casting Gothic shadows upon the walls. By seven it was clear there would not be time for the many still waiting patiently on the hard benches in the hall and he sent Evgenia to take some simple notes to identify the priority cases. Anna worked beside him in the treatment room and he was impressed by her dexterity; she was an able nurse, sensitive
and quick to learn. As he was reaching for scissors to cut a dressing, he touched her cold hand and she looked up at him with a twinkling smile that left him trying to remember the task he was supposed to perform. They were treating their last patient of the day – a man in his twenties with the first bloody signs of consumption – when there was a loud knock at the door, and without waiting for a summons, Grigory Goldenberg walked into the treatment room.

It was more than an unwelcome intrusion. Hadfield felt as if a cold wind had swept in with him, lowering the temperature in the room. Goldenberg was at the clinic to treat no one. He was there to talk of revolution, dressed theatrically for the part in the belted red chemise and high black boots he had worn at the political salon. But Anna was not in the least surprised to see him and offered him her cheek and a warm smile in greeting.

‘We haven’t been formally introduced, Doctor,’ said Goldenberg, offering his hand. ‘Such valuable work.’

‘Thank you. We’ve almost finished,’ he said, turning to soap his hands in the bowl of water Anna had brought him.

‘Then join us for some tea.’

‘Yes, Doctor, you must,’ said Evgenia from the door. Hadfield turned to reach for a cloth and glanced over at Anna but her back was turned to him, her head bent over a box of dressings.

‘Perhaps just for a few minutes,’ he said.

The samovar was set at the edge of a rough table in a long low-vaulted room that looked and smelt like a refectory. Evgenia explained that the building was a poor school but the church had given permission for it to be used as a clinic on Sunday afternoons. What would the priests say if they knew why these ‘good women’ were administrating to the corporeal needs of their flock, Hadfield wondered. But perhaps that was unduly
cynical. Goldenberg’s presence was acting as a dark prism, distorting his perception of the work they were doing.

‘No milk, I’m afraid,’ said Goldenberg. He filled a tarnished pewter pot with water from the samovar, poured a glass and pushed it towards Hadfield. ‘We drink tea the Russian way.’

‘And so do I,’ said Hadfield, settling at the edge of a bench.

‘Would you like something to eat, Doctor?’ Evgenia asked. ‘Thank you, but I’m not hungry.’